STATIC ELECTRICITY

Static electricity occurs when there is a build up of electric

charge on the surface of a material.
It is called static electricity because the charges don’t move.
The electricity we use everyday involves moving charges.
It is this imbalance of positive and negative charges that
causes:
Balloons to stick to walls.
Your hair to stand on end when brush your hair on a dry day.
And the electric shock you sometimes get from the door
handle.
The atom:
Everything we see around us everyday is made of atoms.
We can’t see individual atoms because they are so small.
In fact the diameter of an atom is about 0.0000000001m
In the air in your classroom there are about 1500000000000000000000000000
atoms
The atom is made of 3 sorts of particles
The electron
The proton
The neutron

Inside an atom:
Most of the atom is empty space if atoms were the size of
football fields, the nucleus would be a grain of sand in the
middle and the electrons would be orbiting around the edge
The protons and neutrons sit together in a lump in the
middle called the nucleus
The electrons orbit around the nucleus, a bit like the
planets orbiting the Sun
Charge:
The electron is negatively charged.
The proton is positively charged.
The neutron has no charge, it is neutral.
Most things have the same number of electrons and protons in them.
They don’t have any overall charge.
If this isn’t true interesting things can happen.

How do charges behave?

What do you know about magnets?
2 north poles will repel each other, but a north and a south put together will attract
one another
opposites attract, likes repel
Exactly the same thing happens with charges.
2 positive charges put together will repel each other.
Put a positive charge near a negative charge and they will attract each other.
A charged object may even attract a neutral one
Experiment:
Lightning
What causes lightning?
Lightning is actually just static electricity on
a much larger scale.
The rubbing is caused by air moving around
In thunderclouds bottom is usually negative
and top is positive.

Thunder
When the lightning flash happens it heats the air to a temperature 5 times
hotter than the surface of the sun.

This causes nearby air to expand and vibrate forming the sound we hear as
thunder.
Interesting facts
Lightning bolts can travel at speeds of up to 60,000 miles per second.
Every second around 100 bolts of lightning strike the Earth.
One lightning bolt has enough electricity to power 200,000 homes.
You are more likely to be struck by lightning than be eaten by a shark

Some myths
Lightning never strikes in the same place twice.
False, the Empire State Building is reportedly struck 100 times a year.
Wearing rubber shoes will protect me in a thunder storm.
False, Lighting is too powerful to be stopped by half an inch of rubber or several
hundred feet of rubber for that matter